Intense, inspirational ... indispensable

Tommy Hawkins had a decision to make in the spring of 1955. He had finished an exceptional basketball career at Parker High School as Chicago's best player and several colleges were after him.

His first visit was to Notre Dame, where he found the beauty of the campus awe-inspiring and the faculty and staff warm and welcoming, the student body. . .white. Overwhelmingly white.Hawkins struggled with his feelings. He wanted to go to Notre Dame, even though he would be the only black on the basketball team, one of only 10 blacks on campus. Friends told him those proportions were a recipe for failure. But Hawkins kept recalling an April day on the South Side eight years before, when his mother, Juanita, had summoned him and his friends from playing, made them hush up and sit still. She told them something enormous was about to happen.

"I think I can paraphrase it, God rest her soul," Hawkins said. "She told us Jackie Robinson was going to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers and this would open doors for young black kids like us. That if he was successful, others would come behind him."

Hawkins followed his intuition and went to South Bend. He eventually would meet Robinson and come to know his family. Hawkins' successful passage through Notre Dame led to a 10-year professional basketball career, a stint in the broadcast booth and, finally, his current position as vice president for communications of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Robinson's team.

All because of a decision made with borrowed courage.

It is 50 years since Robinson broke in, 25 since he died. Hawkins lost his mother a little less than a year ago. Reflecting on the crossroads where he found himself in 1955, seeing himself as a high school senior again, teetering between worlds, Hawkins pauses a long time. His throat constricts and his voice drops to a whisper.

"That's when the Jackie thing tapped in," Hawkins said. "Jackie had opened the door and I had to step through."

Jackie Robinson was not a perfect man. His life was flawed, filled with contradiction and ambivalence and tragedy. He died young, yet still outlived his namesake son, who was killed in a car wreck after struggling with drug addiction.

In "The Boys of Summer," author Roger Kahn depicts Robinson's anguish when his son's problems first became public.

"I've had more effect on other people's kids than my own," Robinson said. "I couldn't have had an important effect on anybody's child if this happened to my own."

But Robinson was wrong. Because of what he did April 15, 1947, he had a transforming effect on Hawkins and countless other children and on society at large.

Joseph Dorinson, a history professor at Long Island University, was an 11-year-old in Brooklyn when Robinson broke in.

"Abraham Lincoln said in his (first) inaugural address that `The better angels of our nature' will be summoned," Dorinson said. "That sentiment is what Jackie Robinson best expressed. We certainly have the devil in us and it comes out in bursts of violence on the field or in society. He stood up to those devils and played with dignity and efficiency."

Robinson walked onto a major-league baseball diamond simultaneously prepared for the worst and prepared to do his best. That act was perfect, as perfect as Neil Armstrong's bootprints on the chalky surface of the moon, undisturbed by wind and weather and everything that has come since.

The battle joined

Robinson's initial lonely assault on the color barrier was the first shot in a bloodless battle and, in fact, war was what turned the soil for his arrival. The first back hoes bit in when Jesse Owens made a wordless hash of Nazi stereotypes at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. . More tilling went on when Joe Louis defeated the German boxer Max Schmeling in a 1938 grudge rematch after Hitler's intentions had begun to become clear.

White Americans cheered those feats even though many still were unwilling to live next door to a black family or to enroll their children in an integrated school. But baseball, with its rural, Southern roots and its then-unchallenged preeminence in the sports hierarchy, was viewed differently.

"There was a purity and moral superiority attached to baseball as opposed to other sports, because of its content," said Russell Adams, a Howard University political sociologist. "The idea was to win the game, not to dismantle or injure your opponent. Boxing was something someone else did."

Then the United States entered World War II, where blacks and whites, although fighting in separate units, died for the same cause. The casualties directed a harsh floodlight on the ludicrous inequities entrenched in American culture, injustices the returning vets, many of whom migrated north to the urban industrial centers and entered the mainstream workforce, were determined to rectify.

"The true roots of the civil rights movement were in the 1930s and '40s," Adams said. "Martin Luther King didn't happen in a vacuum.

"There was this feeling of `I will not be banged back to where I was before I learned to kill for my country,' of `We helped save the place. We are not going to go gently back to segregation.' The air was thick with urbanization and improvement in income."

Robinson made his own progression through the era. At UCLA, where he starred in football, track and basketball and studied side-by-side with whites, he earned a reputation for outspokenness. During the war, more than a decade before Rosa Parks would take her empowering stand, Robinson, a second lieutenant, boarded a bus on-base at Ft. Hood, Texas, and sat down next to the white wife of another officer. When the driver ordered him to move, Robinson refused. He was court-martialed and eventually exonerated.

For the love of baseball, however, Robinson assented to a segregated environment when he joined the Negro American League's Kansas City Monarchs. It's unclear what might have happened to him, athletically or otherwise, if Dodger part-owner and General Manager Branch Rickey hadn't cast him in the role of pioneer.

Robinson had a subpar year in 1945 and, even discounting that, he was only one of numerous gifted players in the Negro leagues. But other attributes complemented his baseball skills. Robinson was educated and well-spoken. He already had mingled with whites in a way black players from rural backgrounds had not. He was a spiritually grounded, devoted family man.

"Jackie Robinson was able to destroy the stereotype of Stepin Fetchit, of the libidinous jungle bunny," Dorinson said. "And he wasn't a clown, as in the Harlem Globetrotters. He came to the stage in high seriousness."

Rickey shrewdly calculated the impact of both black talent and the swelling black urban audiences on his franchise. Then he called Robinson in and promptly asked him to be something he was not: restrained.

Robinson recalled the moment in his autobiography:

" `Mr. Rickey,' I said, `are you looking for a Negro who is afraid to fight back?'

"I never will forget the way he exploded.

" `Robinson,' he said, `I am looking for a ballplayer with guts enough not to fight back.' "

Whether Robinson's personality was, in fact, ideally suited to the job has been a subject of debate.

"He was a fiery guy, a temperamental person, and to bottle that up for four years, first in Montreal and then in Brooklyn. . . . I've had players who knew him tell me that the built-up pressure killed him," said Kit Chrissey, a St. Joseph's (Pa.) University English professor who has done extensive research on the Negro leagues.

"As far as the man's innate personality was concerned, I think he was exactly the wrong person. But it worked and he was able to channel his energy."

Many others think differently.

"A more passive person might have broken," said Robin Marra, a political science professor at Franklin Pierce (N.H.) College who teaches a course called "American Culture and Baseball."

"I think he found strength in anger . . . a person greater in talent but lesser in spirit would have collapsed under the weight."

That weight was mitigated somewhat by the Brooklyn faithful, in whom winning brought on color-blindness. Even the sage Rickey couldn't have foreseen the way Jewish fans, with the Holocaust a fresh horror, would embrace Robinson.

"We understood the pain of oppressed minorities," Dorinson said. "On Halloween, kids who were normally our friends would fill socks with chalk and look for Jewish kids to beat on. There were continual assaults on our self-esteem, and we generally didn't fight back.

"There was a strong identification with Jackie Robinson and his heroic assault on the bigots. Almost subliminally, he was our vindication."

In the last days of his career, playing with Pittsburgh, Jewish slugger Hank Greenberg gave Robinson a few words of encouragement after Robinson was hit intentionally by a pitch.

"He stood beside me on first base with his chin up like a prince," said Greenberg, who had endured his share of prejudice.

Robinson went on to win Rookie of the Year in 1947 and in 1949 was voted National League MVP. Black players would win that award eight times over the next decade.

One by one, other dominoes, black as Robinson's skin, white as his smile, began to fall. In 1948, President Harry Truman signed an executive order formally integrating the armed services. That same year, in Shelley v. Kraemer, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the restrictive residential "covenants" that had enabled white homeowners to band together and keep out blacks and other minority groups.

Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark school desegregation case, followed in 1954, and in 1955, Rosa Parks ignited the Birmingham bus boycott, a harbinger of the civil disobedience that would become a hallmark of every subsequent social justice movement.

Ironically, the major league debuts of Robinson and a handful of other blacks to the majors in the late '40s ultimately would kill off the Negro leagues, thus limiting baseball jobs for blacks in the short run and permanently ratcheting down the sport's place in black social life.

There were other apparent anomalies in Robinson's life. He chafed at what he saw as submissiveness in other black players, yet criticized the left-leaning tendencies of assertive black actor Paul Robeson in testimony before that bastion of intolerance, the House Un-American Activities Committee. Robinson supported Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy, worked for moderate GOP candidate Nelson Rockefeller in 1964 and had little use for the militant rhetoric of the late 1960s.

"Jackie Robinson got bad press from radical blacks who didn't understand their own tradition or his courage under fire," Dorinson said. "What obscured their judgment was his political conservatism. He lived in suburbia, he was a self-made man. It made sense that he was a Republican.

"But he didn't lose his compassion or his passion. He was a `race man,' to use that old phrase, always alert to injustice."

Had Robinson failed to endure, someone else would have succeeded. But as it was, 12 years passed before every major-league team had a black on its roster. One stumble and the process doubtless would have taken longer. Valuable time would have been lost, not only for Willie Mays and Ernie Banks and Elston Howard, but for the kids who saw something of themselves in the faces on the baseball cards.

'Now let's broaden'

Sometimes the point is getting there. The moon isn't colonized, yet it can be argued that looking up and knowing men walked there is intrinsically valuable. It is hard to believe, however, Jackie Robinson would be satisfied with that kind of brightly glowing yet remote legacy.

"Integration in baseball has already proved that all Americans can live together in peaceful competition," Robinson said in 1964, after he had become a successful corporate executive. "Negroes and whites co-exist today on diamonds south, north, east and west without friction, fistfights or feuds. . . .

"Now let's broaden the focus."

The moon voyages, in some ways, are an apt analogy for blacks in professional baseball. Although popular, well-paid black stars abound, there are few black faces in coaching, management or owner's boxes. College baseball is nearly bereft of black players; on the eight teams that advanced to the 1995 College World Series, only six of 144 players were black. Baseball crowds are crushingly white in most cities.

"The black middle class now doesn't regard going to baseball games as a middle-class activity," Adams said. " `Community' baseball has almost disappeared. It's like voter participation. There was a surge when the barriers were removed, and then a decline.

"But to me, the opening of other arenas--even golf, by God--is an echo of 1947."

Hawkins deeply regrets baseball's demise in the inner city, which, he believes, springs from the deterioration of the black family. Basketball thrives in part because it is cheap and can be practiced alone. Baseball can't sprout through cracks like weeds in asphalt. It needs space, other bodies, adults to promote and teach it.

"The black male has not taken the role within the community that should be taken," Hawkins said. "It takes an investment of time. A lot of people say blacks don't have that time, that it's survival out there, working for a living. But blacks have to make that time."

Last May, the forces that intertwined in Hawkins' life back in 1955 came together again one last time. He was in Los Angeles, on his way to deliver a luncheon speech to local students who had won scholarships from the Jackie Robinson Foundation, when he received a long-distance phone call. His mother, weakened by cancer and a series of strokes, had passed away in Chicago at age 87.

"I thought, do I call and tell them I can't come, or would Mom want me to suck it up?" Hawkins said. "I decided to go, and not to tell anyone. I didn't want to inject myself."

Hawkins stood up before 150 kids and parents and VIPs, including Robinson's widow, and sailed through about three-quarters of his prepared remarks.

"Then I got to the part where I was trying to convey to them what my mother had conveyed to me when I was 9, and I completely broke up," he said.

After Hawkins had buried his mother and returned home, he began to work on a poem. It was homage, it was therapy. He composed 10 couplets, each posing a question. The poem expresses his fear that future generations, gazing at Robinson like an orb in the sky, will see only slowly diffusing light and not the solid mass behind it.

A sample:

Do they know you were a Black Moses with a soul of raging fire,

A man who firmly stood his ground with undiminished desire?

Hawkins completed the elegy in February. Shortly afterward, Dorinson contacted him, hoping for help as he organized a 50th-anniversary conference honoring Robinson at LIU's Brooklyn campus. Dorinson traveled to Los Angeles and visited Hawkins in his office at Dodger Stadium. On an impulse, Hawkins decided to read the poem aloud to Dorinson. It was the first time he had shared the piece with anyone.

When Hawkins finished, Dorinson's head was bowed. He lifted it, misty-eyed. They looked at each other, the black athlete-turned-executive and the white professor.

"It was like a quiet wave of strength, of communication, rolled between us," Hawkins said.